The only marketing channel 40% of buyers say doesn't tire them at all

Every digital channel we’ve built our pipeline on is wearing buyers out. Cold calls, marketing emails, sales outreach — all north of 80% fatigue.

But there is good news out there: there’s exactly one channel buyers say doesn’t tire them at all.

The full picture is in our new 2026 Digital Fatigue Report with UserEvidence — a survey of 425 marketing professionals on what's working, what's wearing buyers out, and where the budgets are actually moving.

I hosted a 45-minute panel on April 8, 2026, to dig into the findings with Brendan Hufford (Growth Sprints), Austin Olea (UserEvidence), and Julie Wiethop (Ocrolus).

45 - minutes is a big ask, so here are three moments from the conversation worth your time, and a link to watch the whole thing.

The numbers + the reframe

The digital marketing fatigue numbers are brutal.

84% of buyers report fatigue from cold calls.
83% from marketing emails
82% from sales outreach emails

Pick your channel, find a tired buyer. 

Then the chart flips.

40% of buyers report zero fatigue from direct mail and gifting. 

No other channel comes close.

Brendan's framing on the panel: digital marketing has become a "metadata mad lib," and we're all drowning in it.

He's not wrong about who built the mad lib, either. We did. AI didn't fix the broken parts of digital — it just dropped the cost of marketing spam to near zero. We scaled volume. We didn't scale trust. And as Brendan put it, four out of five buyers are tuning us out because of it.

The recording goes deeper on why this is the moment to do something about it and what “something” actually looks like, beyond adding another channel to the noise.

The $7 bag of gummy worms

One moment I keep coming back to wasn't a stat. It was a story about a colleague of mine.

The best gift anyone on our team has ever received was a $7 bag of sour gummy worms. Or if you’re me, a $15 bag of locally sourced coffee. Not a $200 bottle of whiskey. Not a fancy branded gift box. Sour gummy worms and local coffee.

Why? Because the sender had actually listened. In a previous conversation, they'd heard about how the recipient's daughter had become obsessed with worms after seeing them for the first time in California rain. So they sent gummy worms — for the kid.

$7.

30 seconds of actual attention. Genuine emotions of gratitude.

The data support this: 51% of buyers said what made a gift land was that it felt genuinely personalized. Price wasn’t on the list.

Note: If the gummy worms thing sounds familiar, we wrote about it here. Worth a re-read.

What it actually looks like in the wild

Theory is one thing. One of the most useful stretches of the panel was Julie walking through how Ocrolus actually does this and the numbers they're pulling. They’re what marketers pray for.

She uses a three-stage framework borrowed from Chris Walker: create demand, capture intent, land and expand. Direct mail and gifting sit at the center of all three.

A few of the numbers she shared:

• 20% of budget owners pre-booked meetings before a recent industry conference because of a personalized send.
• 60% of those pre-booked meetings actually showed up, roughly double what Ocrolus saw before they layered direct mail into the pre-event motion.
• 35% of Ocrolus's closed-won deals include a Sendoso touchpoint at some point in the journey.

Her closing line was the one that stuck: "It's not about the budget. The biggest thing you can do is keep it as personalized as you can."

Watch the rest

Most of the data above comes from the State of Gifting & Direct Mail 2026 report, which we put together with UserEvidence if you want the full picture.

But the report is the easy part.

The conversation between Brendan, Austin, and Julie — about what's actually working in the field right now, what isn't, and what came up in the live Q&A — is what made the hour worth showing up for.

[Watch the on-demand recording]

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